PX4 autopilot customization for non-standard gimbal and UWB peripherals

Due to their extreme versatility, autonomous drones have been gaining a lot of interest over the last decades. Applications are mainly intended to reduce injuries, saving lives and optimizing already existing processes, covering a wide range of scenarios, such as smart agriculture, emergency situations and safety inspections. PIC4SeR, PoliTO Interdepartmental Centre for Service Robotics, embraced this topic a few years ago starting to develop different UAVs, from ultralight models lighter than 250 grams to much heavier drones, in order to exploit technologies oriented to service robotics, smart cities, precision agriculture and search-rescue operations, which are the main topics of interest of the center. This thesis was born as one of the building blocks of a wider project about swarm flight, indoor navigation and robots cooperation, that will take place in the near future merging several technologies coming from different works carried by researchers, PhD students and master thesis works. As most of the standard solutions implemented in autonomous drone navigation rely on GNSS positioning, indoor navigation represents one of the main challenges to be managed. Although computer vision is getting more and more accurate, allowing a possible solution to this problem, it always needs a lot of computational power, requiring the addition of companion PCs, increasing both the system complexity and the UAV's weight. Nonetheless, an emerging technology used to solve indoor navigation problems leaning on very low hardware resources components, is the Ultra Wide Band technology, an anchor-tag radio-frequency based positioning system. Considering that no drivers for the integration of UWB modules in UAV autopilots have been developed in literature so far, the goal of this thesis is the deep understanding of the RTOS PX4 autopilot firmware, and the implementation of custom modules, drivers and commands, with particular focus on UWB nodes.